Against Bosses,Against Oligarchies:A Conversation with Richard Rorty

Richard RortyDerek NystromKent Puckett

PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESSCHICAGO

CONTENTS

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iAgainst Bosses, Against Oligarchies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Copyright © 2002 Prickly Paradigm Press, LLCFirst published by Prickly Pear Pamphlets in 1998.All rights reserved.

Prickly Paradigm Press, LLC5629 South University AvenueChicago, Il 60637

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ISBN: 0-9717575-2-6LCCN: 2002 104696

INTRODUCTION

We interviewed Richard Rorty for four hours over thecourse of a weekend in Charlottesville. This interview isnot only, we think, ideally timed, following closelyseveral recent publications by Rorty, but captures Rortyat his most energetic. Rorty’s work is well known for itsgeniality and measured tone, and, while our discussionremains always constructive, there appears in these pagesa combative Richard Rorty familiar, perhaps, to thosewho have seen him in debate, but new to those whoknow him only from his published work.

Although the following conversation addressesmany subjects—Rorty’s own intellectual history, theeffects of globalization, academic labor—its first motiva-tion is the recently published Achieving Our Country:

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Progressive Movement and the New Deal,” and suggestfor Rorty a means of thinking of America and democracyin such a way as to retain patriotism without losing one’ssense of justice and one’s necessary anger at injustice:“Both Dewey and Whitman viewed the United States asan opportunity to see ultimate significance in a finite,human, historical project, rather than in somethingeternal and nonhuman.” In other words, the real secularpromise of America was big enough, diverse enough, andpotential enough to exceed the specific character of itsweaknesses or its mistakes. That’s not to say thatAmerica could do no wrong or that one should ignorewrong-doing in America’s name; rather, a progressivepatriotism’s duty is to ensure that the “rich diversity”and promise of that America are protected and main-tained.

Rorty argues that against the Whitmanesquepatriot acting in the name of American potential is whathe calls the spectatorial leftist, a cultural pessimist whosees the very foundations of liberal democracy ascomplicit in a larger and slightly shadowy conspiracyagainst the powerless. Once this figure has given up allhope in the larger promise of, in this case, America, heor she becomes a passive and cynical spectator, a willfullymarginal critic who sneers without suggestion and whoneither cherishes principle nor can truly practice politics.This leftist appears in a variety of contexts throughoutAchieving Our Country, but is most clearly associatedwith the new left that Rorty suggests turned away fromthe old left and against America in the ‘60s. Rorty’s ownpolitics grew out of the New Deal sympathies of bothhis family and the friends of his family, as well as the

Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. That book,adapted from Rorty’s 1997 Massey Lectures at HarvardUniversity, takes as its subject the life and health of theAmerican left. Of course, that left is in no way a simpleor single entity and Rorty’s book—part history, partdiagnosis, part prescription—works to understand itboth in terms of the patriotic, Whitmanesque vision thathe suggests determined and consolidated its earliestcourse, and the particular contexts (the Vietnam War,Watergate, etc.) that seemed to allow some parts of theleft to find it “absurd for Americans to continue to takepride in their country.”

Rorty begins Achieving our Country (he takes thetitle, importantly, from the last line of James Baldwin’sThe Fire Next Time) with an account of the sources of hisown leftism, a political position that allows for and infact demands a sense of national pride. "National pride,"says Rorty, "is to countries what self-respect is to indi-viduals: a necessary condition for self-improvement."Without patriotism, a progressive, effective, majoritarianpolitics is impossible and, Rorty suggests, it is theabsence of that patriotism that has rendered leftist poli-tics enervated and without direction. With this crisis inmind, Rorty’s book asks a series of basic questions: whatwas the left and what are its sources? What does the leftlook like today? How can the left achieve the patrioticdignity to make a majoritarian leftism possible onceagain?

Rorty’s answer to the first question centers ontwo figures in particular: Walt Whitman and JohnDewey. These thinkers did a great deal to shape “thequasi-communitarian rhetoric...at the heart of the

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name Andrew Ross or Frederic Jameson, for example)whose “longing for total revolution” and belief in thedeep corruption of the Western tradition make areformist politics suspect in theory and impossible inpractice. While Rorty grants that this cultural left hasreduced the amount of sadism and cruelty that the lesspowerful need experience and “has made America a farmore civilized society than it was thirty years ago,” itsinability to address practically issues of class and laborhas removed the left from areas where political actioncould do the most good. In other words, when specificinstances of economic injustice and unfair labor practicesare replaced with totalizing concepts like “late capi-talism” and “ideology,” the cultural left find themselvesto be practically powerless, but comfortable with theidea that they, at least, know better. “Theorists of theleft think that dissolving political agents into plays ofdifferential subjectivity, or political initiatives intopursuits of Lacan’s impossible object of desire, helps tosubvert the established order” (93). Rorty believes theyare wrong. Rorty recommends finally that the separationbetween the old and new left, a rift built on conflictsdecades old, must be overcome, and that the spectatorialcultural left must return to the messy, contingent busi-ness of progressive politics. In fact, Rorty argues, thegood moral work done by the cultural left, work thatmade the lives of the less powerful better and morehumane, may be undone by this left’s inability to chal-lenge the right’s largely successful and continuingeconomic onslaught. While the left has worked, willfullyit seems, to imagine itself as part of some minority,Rorty warns, the Right has, without opposition, captured

anti-Stalinist work of some of the so-called New YorkIntellectuals: “As a teenager, I believed every anti-Stalinist word that Sidney Hook and Lionel Trillingpublished in Partisan Review—partly, perhaps, because Ihad been bounced on their knees as a baby” (61). WhereRorty’s old leftist (Irving Howe is another example forRorty) was a public intellectual passionately committedto class politics, publishing articles in journals likeCommentary or the Partisan Review, and who could “beboth a fervent anti-communist and a good leftist,” thenew left (think of student anti-war protesters, BlackPanthers, Tom Hayden, and Abbie Hoffman) felt thatthe old left’s irrational hatred of communism underwrotethe conflict in Vietnam and permitted the worst excessesof the Cold War. While Rorty agrees that the new leftdid what the old perhaps could not (“they stopped theVietnam War”), the continuing rift between whatremains of the old left and the new makes any majori-tarian, progressive American politics difficult if notimpossible.

More immediately, Rorty critiques the culturalleft, “heirs of the new left” who “specialize in what theycall the ‘politics of difference’ or ‘of identity’ or ‘ofrecognition’.” This left, suggests Rorty, maintains thenew left’s disdain for America and thinks more aboutsocial or cultural “stigma” than it does about the top-down initiatives and concern for class and money thatcharacterizes his old left progressive politics (inGoffman’s sense, “stigma” are marks or handicaps thathave no essential qualities of their own, but act as rela-tional points against which society defines the “normal”).These are primarily academic intellectuals (Rorty might

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examination of the “grounds” upon which these disci-plines make their knowledge-claims (3). He surveys thehistorical development of this philosophical tradition,and argues that while this project was important inhelping to establish the secular intellectual culture of theEnlightenment, it is one that may have outlived itsusefulness. However, Rorty does not make this argumentby claiming that philosophy’s conception of itself (as ameta-discipline which inspects the foundations of theknowledge-claims made by other disciplines) is onewhich somehow misconstrues its “real” role, or that thisquest for epistemological foundations misunderstandsthe “true nature” of knowledge-claims. Instead, heproposes, we should stop worrying about the “real role”of such activities and the “true nature” of their objects ofstudy in the first place.

Following Wittgenstein, Rorty contends thatphilosophy has conceived of its mission in this waybecause it has been held “captive” by “the picture...of themind as a great mirror, containing various representa-tions—some accurate, some not—and capable of beingstudied by pure, non-empirical methods” (12). As a wayof getting out from under this picture, he suggests, asWittgenstein did, that we view our ways of describingand explaining the world as “tools” which help us getalong in that world, rather than as representations of theworld which could be said to be more or less correct.Here, Rorty is talking about all sorts of linguistic prac-tices—scientific claims, mundane observations, and soon. For example, where the traditional philosopherwould describe Newton’s claim that force equals masstimes acceleration (f=ma) as true because it offers an

and captivated the majority. And, if a reformist left is tohave anything to do with the achievement of America, itisn’t enough to watch politics; they must be practicedand practiced progressively.

�Some of the arguments put forth in Achieving

Our Country are controversial rejoinders to positionsheld by many of Rorty’s fellow academic leftists—indeed,to some, they may seem almost willfully contrarian. Yetthis is not an unfamiliar position for Rorty. For prior tohis recent fame as a leftist commentator (a renownwhich grants him the curious honor of having GeorgeWill devote an entire Newsweek column to attacking hislatest book), Rorty was well known as an iconoclasticphilosopher who challenged the precepts of his owndiscipline. Here, we would like to offer a brief sketch ofRorty’s ideas for readers who may not be familiar withsome of his important earlier work.

Rorty first came to the attention of readersoutside of American philosophy departments in 1979,with the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror ofNature. The book was a sustained, thorough-goingcritique of the dominant analytic mode of philosophypracticed by most English and American philosophers.However, what was most compelling about this critiquefor the book’s more general audience was its concomi-tant deconstruction of the larger “Cartesian-Kantian”tradition of thought, which seeks out absolute, transcen-dental “foundations” for our knowledge of the world.This tradition, Rorty writes, is concerned primarily with“underwrit[ing] or debunk[ing] claims to knowledgemade by science, morality, art, or religion” through an

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philosophically relativistic as well as politicallydangerous or disabling, and Rorty has seen his fair shareof this criticism as well. To put it in a perhaps overlyschematic way, his early, more philosophically-orientedwork (which includes the two aforementioned volumes)can be said to concentrate on the former charge of rela-tivism—an accusation, he maintains, which has teethonly if one believes in an objective, neutral languagewhich stands outside of time and place. His later workhas been increasingly concerned with engaging the polit-ical questions posed by a pragmatist outlook. As Rortyhimself acknowledges, the “most powerful” objection topragmatism is the “consequence” that:

when the secret police come, when the torturersviolate the innocent, there is nothing to be saidto them of the form “There is something withinyou which you are betraying. Though youembody the practices of a totalitarian societywhich will endure forever, there is somethingbeyond those practices which condemns you.”(Consequences xlii)

In other words, if we do not have any transcendent,foundational criteria for choosing between languages, orworld-views, how can we argue against, say, the Nazis?Further, if one’s political and moral vocabulary is acontingent product of time and place, how can one bemotivated to defend the values of this vocabulary?

Rorty’s book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,published in 1989, can be viewed as a way of trying toanswer these questions. First of all, the book contends,

accurate picture of the world—and thus Correspondswith Reality—Rorty asks us to view Newton’s formula astrue because it provides us with an effective tool foraccomplishing certain tasks in the world (such assuccessfully predicting force). Again, it is important tonote that Rorty does not claim that “there is no suchthing as truth” or, for that matter, that “there is no suchthing as the outside world,” but only that the question“Does this description of the world accurately corre-spond to what it describes?” is one which we may wantto stop asking. Similarly, he does not claim that the“correspondence theory of truth” fails to grasp the true,Wittgensteinian-tool-like way language really works,only that Wittgenstein’s model may be a more usefulway of thinking about language for our presentpurposes.

In suggesting that we change our philosophicalconversations, Rorty explicitly aligns himself with thetradition of American pragmatism inaugurated byWilliam James and John Dewey a century ago.Furthermore, as he noted in his 1982 collection ofessays, Consequences of Pragmatism, the anti-foundation-alist arguments of these thinkers found new relevance inthe explosion of structuralist and post-structuralisttheory which reverberated through American literaturedepartments in the 1970s and 80s: “James and Deweywere not only waiting at the end of the dialectical roadwhich analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting atthe end of the road which, for example, Foucault andDeleuze are currently traveling” (xviii). Of course, thesetwo groups—pragmatists and post-structuralists—arefrequently accused of purveying ideas that are both

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(94). That is, the job of building human solidarity.Hence, we might be able to characterize Rorty’s pragma-tist response to the “Nazi question” as consisting of twoanswers. First, one doesn’t refute Nazis, or any otherworld-view; one offers a redescription of the worldwhich makes their description look untenable. Second,and Rorty is clear that this consists more of a hope thana guarantee, the properly ironist intellectual, with herwide range of acquaintance, will have read too manynovels and ethnographies to fall for a vocabulary whichimagines itself to have some privileged relationship toTruth, and which ignores the pain of others.

Yet Rorty also hesitates to claim too much forthe political uses of either redescription or ironist self-consciousness. In fact, he notes that “redescription oftenhumiliates” (90); that is, the act of re-casting the worldin the terms of a new language game can often havecruel consequences, as the one redescribing the worldoverwhelms and makes irrelevant the descriptions andlanguage games upon which others had based their lives(which, as Rorty explains, is what O’Brien does toWinston Smith in 1984, and what Humbert does toLolita in Lolita). Indeed, Rorty cautions that while thedesire to craft a new final vocabulary which redescribesthe world apart from the language games one inheritedis a central activity of ironist self-creation, it is also onewhich is largely irrelevant to public life. Thus, hesuggests that the ironist intellectual enact a kind ofcognitive public/private split: that one’s “radical andcontinuing doubts about [one’s] final vocabulary” (72),and the ensuing attempt to redescribe the world as anact of self-creation, be kept private, while one’s public

“the notions of criteria and choice...are no longer inpoint when it comes to changes from one language gameto another” for the simple reason that such criteria andchoices may only be formulated in the terms of a specificlanguage game (6). Instead, Rorty suggests, changes invocabularies are more a result of the power of what hecalls “redescription.” Drawing upon Thomas Kuhn’saccounts of how scientific revolutions occur, Rortyreminds us that Galilean mechanics did not supersedeAristotelian conceptions of the world because the formerwas the superior choice based upon a mutually accept-able set of criteria; instead, Galileo offered an entirelynew set of criteria for intellectual inquiry whichdisplaced those of Aristotle. Galileo re-described theworld that had been previously described by Aristotle byoffering a new language game, which made the oldlanguage game look bad. Thus, Rorty concludes,“nothing can serve as a criticism of a final vocabularysave another such vocabulary; there is no answer to aredescription save a re-re-redescription” (80).

The sort of intellectual Rorty prefers, then, isone who makes herself familiar with as many vocabu-laries and language games as possible by acquaintingherself with as many novels and ethnographies as she canget her hands on. In doing so, this intellectual becomesan “ironist” about her own vocabulary, recognizing it asa contingent product of the time and place in which shewas born. Furthermore, Rorty asserts, in his desiredpost-metaphysical culture, “novels and ethnographieswhich sensitize one to the pain of those who do notspeak our language must do the job which demonstra-tions of a common human nature were supposed to do”

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TOWARDS A NEW OLD LEFT

Q: We’ll start with an obvious question: Why did youwrite Achieving Our Country?

RR: In an inchoate way, I’ve always wanted to writesomething about the left in America. I’ve been buyingbooks more or less relevant to the subject—books onAmerican radicalism at various stages in the nation’shistory—for years and years. I knew I’d like to writesomething about American intellectual history, but hadno very definite plan. Then Harvard asked me to givethe Massey lectures on American Civilization. I wasdelighted, because my hero Irving Howe had given them.I liked the idea of following in his footsteps. So I set asidea year to read some more, and to try to write something.

life remains dedicated to the liberal hope of diminishingcruelty and expanding human solidarity. In short, Rorty’smodel intellectual is what he calls a liberal ironist: onewho continues to defend and support principles ofliberal hope, despite their lack of metaphysical guaran-tees, by “distinguish[ing] between redescription forprivate and for public purposes” (91).

This provocative suggestion for separating polit-ical and philosophical (or aesthetic) pursuits is also oneof Rorty’s most controversial, and in our interview hediscusses his responses to some of the objections to thisproposal. What is important to note here is the way thisproposal highlights his insistence that political concernstake precedence over philosophical principles, and that,if anything, the latter should be tailored to fit theformer. Indeed, as he puts it in the first volume of hisPhilosophical Papers (Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth)Rorty has long argued for “the priority of democracy tophilosophy.”

Thus, after helping to revive American pragma-tism—a philosophy he describes as particularly suited todemocratic politics—Rorty has turned in his most recentwork to the more pressing concerns of those politics,particularly in Achieving Our Country. We hope that thefollowing interview will further illuminate his mostrecent political interventions, and their relation to thelarger body of his thought.

Derek Nystrom and Kent PuckettSeptember 1998

RR: Well, all kinds of people during McCarthy’s peakyears were saying the same thing they had said beforeand after: that socialism was a good idea in some form orother, because unrestricted capitalism, like the man said,immiserates the proletariat. Unfortunately, theycontinued, socialism has been perverted by mad tyrantslike Lenin and Stalin, who have erected an evil empire.So now you had to fight the evil empire with the onehand, and forge democratic socialism with the other. Idon’t see a lack of wiggle room. McCarthy and hispeople, of course, said that any suggestion that capi-talism needed any improvement or correction waslending aid and sympathy to the evil empire. But, ofcourse, that was not so.

Q: Why do you think that McCarthy was able to do forscurrilous right-wing anti-communism what people likeMartin Dies couldn’t do?

RR: I don’t know. Perhaps he was slightly moreunscrupulous. Why did Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwellsuddenly make it big? How did they break out of thelittle world of the televangelists and into semi-control ofthe Republican party? I don’t really know. Every once ina while fundamentalists and unscrupulous demagoguesmanage to break out of their cages and to whip themasses into a frenzy.

Q: Were you at Yale during this period?

RR: I was at Chicago until ‘52, and then I was at Yalefrom ‘52 to ‘56. I remember watching the Army-

Q: In Achieving our Country you make a spirited defenseof being a Cold War liberal—that is, an anti-communistliberal—and I was wondering if you could expand onthat a little bit, because you suggest that had thereformist left been stronger they could have crafted ananti-communism that wouldn’t have been the horribleMcCarthyite anti-communism. I was wondering if youcould talk a little bit more about what that might havelooked like.

RR: There was a non-McCarthyite kind of anti-commu-nism. People like Dean Acheson thought of the commu-nists in the same terms as people like Norman Thomas,or for that matter Senator Vandenberg. BeforeMcCarthy, people like Martin Dies and J. ParnellThomas had been trying to get what they could out ofanti-communist hearings demagoguery, but they weredisdained by many politicians of both parties. ThenMcCarthy somehow managed to get anti-communismfront and center and scared the life out of everybody. Hegave anti-communism a bad name.

Q: I guess the question would be, how would it havebeen possible—maybe if only rhetorically—to craft astrong anti-communist and a strong socialist world-view?

RR: What’s the problem?

Q: I guess, where’s the wiggle room, given aMcCarthyite culture?

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whereas when you took the CIA’s money, you didn’treally work to their orders. People like Stephen Spenderand Melvin Lasky (the editors of Encounter) weresupposed to have known where the money was comingfrom. Maybe they did. However, I don’t think they werepressured to do anything; they just did what came natu-rally—and that was exactly what the CIA wanted themto do. I think Christopher Lasch’s suggestion that themoney from the CIA showed that Spender and Laskywere just as dirty as everybody else was wrong. The anti-Communist intellectuals in Europe, whose writings werepublished with the help of CIA money, were heroicfigures—people like Silone and Kuestler and RaymondAron. Being anti-Communist in the late 1940s in Francewas not easy. Aron got a really hard time. I think theywere very good people, and I don’t want their memoriessoiled forever by Lasch’s association of them with theCIA.

Q: Your account of the Cold War in the new book isprimarily about what the Cold War wasn’t: that it wasn’t,as you suggest the cultural left sometimes thinks, simplythis monolithic, Foucauldian scam invented by thegovernment to keep us in line. And since this is a viewdifferent from the one a lot of us have of the Cold War,I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about whatyou think the Cold War was about: what was the point,besides registering moral outrage with Stalin? And, ifwe’re trying to re-unite the left afterwards, what are thethings you think we could learn from the Cold War?

RR: I’m not sure there’s anything particularly positive to

McCarthy hearings at Yale. Chicago was perhaps theleft-most American university except maybe CCNY andColumbia. When the communists took Czechoslovakiain ‘48, I was a member of the Chicago student senate (orwhatever they called it). I introduced a resolution ofsympathy with the students of Charles University who’dbeen killed by the Communists. It was killed 40-2,because it was seen as lending aid and comfort to thecapitalists. It was viewed as red-baiting. In those days,Chicago students genuinely believed that sayinganything nasty about Stalin counted as red-baiting. Thestudent newspaper was communist, and eventually itturned out that the editor had been registering for onecredit a quarter. He was getting paid, believe it or not,by Moscow gold. He was being paid by the party to runthe student newspaper. When McCarthy came along andsaid the Communists had infiltrated everywhere, hecould produce lots of similar examples.

But, of course, Chicago was not typical of theAmerican academy at that time. I spent my time atChicago making red-baiting remarks, as I had beenbrought up to do. I became unpopular with my fellowstudents for making them.

Q: Is there necessarily a difference between what youcall “Moscow gold” and the funding that the CIAprovided to anti-communist groups like the Congress forCultural Freedom during the Cold War?

RR: The difference is that Stalin’s was a bad governmentand ours was a relatively good government. Also, whenyou took Stalin’s money you worked to Stalin’s orders,

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new left did, because the old left wasn’t able to fight thebattles that the new left needed to fight—to stop theVietnam War, to push civil rights agendas, et cetera—there does seem to be a kind of Decline and Fall narra-tive. You seem to claim that, until the ‘60s, the reformistleft was doing the right thing, but around the ‘60s,things started to fall apart. The intellectual left lost itsconnection with the labor movement, and stoppedworrying so much about money and started worryingabout stigma, as you put it. One of my questions is whyyou cite the break between left intellectuals and laborhere. Others, such as Kim Moody (among others), havesuggested that in fact it was the Red Scare and purges inthe CIO that forced a lot of left-aligned intellectuals outof a close, on-the-ground connection with the labormovement. In other words, the break between the leftand labor, and between intellectuals and labor, was in thelate ‘40s and early ‘50s, rather than the ‘60s.

RR: That doesn’t make sense to me.

Q: Well, people like Moody argue that a lot of thepeople who were arguing for a more aggressive “socialunionism” were victims of purges in the CIO, and whatwas left were people who were more amenable to a kindof “business unionism,” to a kind of narrowing of theunion agenda to contracts, as opposed to being part of alarger social democratic movement.

RR: Some of that may be true, but I’m not sure howmany such people there were. Certainly some people—people left over from the ‘30s who had thought the

be learned. There was a certain amount of unanimityunder Truman. Big business, fat-cat Republicans, andthe liberals I keep citing like Schlesinger, Galbraith,Eleanor Roosevelt and the like all agreed that the battlefought in World War II to make the world safe fordemocracy had to be continued because we had run upagainst another anti-democratic evil empire. We had tostart in containing Communism. I think they were right.Like any war, the Cold War turned into an occasion forsix different kinds of corruption and deception. In theend, we got what had been the primary objective of theCold War: a chance for democratic governments inEastern Europe. But we also had memories of the assas-sination of Allende, of the Vietnam War, and otherhorrors. So like any other war, the Cold War left allkinds of ghastly things in its wake.

You can look at World War II as having had allkinds of secret agendas. (Why didn’t we bomb the head-quarters of I.G. Farben, for example?) But World War IIdidn’t last long enough to generate its own internalcorruptions, so it can be remembered as a fairly straight-forward crusade. I think about half the Cold War can beremembered as a fairly straightforward crusade. Theother half consisted of opportunistic and disastrousadventures by people like General Westmoreland andHenry Kissinger. But the Cold War doesn’t strike me ashaving a great big overall meaning. It was just the usualmess that any war is.

Q: Through much of Achieving Our Country, you discussthe new left, and while you do qualify these discussionsby arguing that there were a lot of important things the

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Consider Michael Walzer, who’s approximately my age,and was a student of Howe’s at Brandeis. I think his takeon contemporary politics and mine are pretty muchidentical. He and I thought of ourselves as on the leftboth before the ‘60s and after the ‘60s, thought of theCommunists as a goddamned nuisance who had to begot rid of, and also thought of the far-out student radi-cals of the ‘60s as a nuisance we had to get rid of, lestthey be used against the left by the right. Mine doesn’tseem to me a very distinctive point of view—it’s justplain ordinary old left.

Q: I guess I may be asking that biographically orientedquestion because it struck me, especially in that sectionof Achieving Our Country as well as in “Trotsky and theWild Orchids” that your more recent political writinghas also, it seems, been more biographically motivated.

RR: It’s just a symptom of age...

Q: And your description of the reformist left circle inwhich you were raised seems to imply, “Why can’t we goback to this?” One response might be that it may not bethat easy any more—we can’t just rely on an old NewDeal politics, that the ground has moved out from underthat in a certain way.

RR: I guess I just don’t see what the change has been.What’s wrong with New Deal politics?

Q: One would be tremendous demographic shifts—whomakes up the working class now. Yes, in some ways, the

united front was a good idea—were loath to give up thewartime alliance with the Communists. Reuther andLewis and others did a good job of getting rid of theCommunists. They may have taken some non-Communist social activists out with them, but I’d besurprised if there were very many.

Q: The argument on this version of the story, though, isthat this is where the tremendous advances that the leftmade in the ‘30s and ‘40s were rolled back.

RR: I don’t see that. If you thought that the US shouldhave something like the British Labour Party, as opposedto the simply ad-hoc, pragmatic compromises that thesteel, auto, and coal workers were making, then ofcourse your expectations were disappointed. But I doubtit would have made much of a difference if we had hadan analogue of the British Labour Party as opposed tounion leaders like Hillman and Reuther having the influ-ence they did within the Democratic Party. Moody’sclaim that once upon a time there was a great revolu-tionary spirit amongst the American working class andthat it was betrayed by its leaders in the late ‘40s seemswrong. There was an attempt to get better wages andworking conditions, and they got some of those things.

Q: Given your somewhat in-between generational loca-tion—as you describe in Achieving Our Country, you wereraised in an old left family—how would you characterizeyour politics: old left, new left, somewhere in-between?

RR: It seems to me just plain ordinary old leftism.

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THE NEW LEFT INTO A CULTURAL LEFT

Q: I’m interested by your take on the genealogy of thecultural left. One of the things that I got out of that filmabout the New York Intellectuals, “Arguing the World,”is that members of the old left saw it as a major triumphthat the Partisan Review was mixing cultural criticismwith politics—that for people like Lionel Trilling andClement Greenberg, it was important that politics andculture be brought together.

RR: I don’t think it was a major triumph. I think all thatwas important was that high culture ceased to be seen asan enemy of leftist politics. People like Nicholas MurrayButler, the President of Columbia in the ‘20s, andPresident Lowell of Harvard wanted to use high cultureto support social conservativism. They did not thinkJews and radicals could have high culture. What Trilling,Howe et al. did was to take what we now call literarymodernism and claim that this was high culture, and thatit belonged to the left. Actually, many great modernistwriters were fascist, just as C.P. Snow said. But thatdidn’t matter, as long as the study of the high culture ofthe day was associated with the left rather than the right.Bringing culture and politics together was somethingelse. Partisan Review had two kinds of articles: questionson the relation between Pound and Eliot, and questionslike “Shall we ally ourselves with the Communists?” or“Should we break with the Trotskyites?” The two topicsdid not really have much to do with each other.

Q: I wonder in that case if we could see the Partisan

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New Deal was able to mobilize diverse elements of theworking class, but it was almost all European “ethnics”who were organized, and now it’s a lot more difficult todo that when you have a more multicultural workingclass.

RR: I don’t see that. Why should the difference betweenthe Poles, the Italians, and the Irish be thought of as lessthan the difference between the Vietnamese and theMexicans? Why are we supposed to be more multicul-tural now than we were in 1910? The Poles didn’t muchlike the Irish, even though they had Catholicism incommon. If you tell the Chinese and the Vietnamesethat they have Buddhism in common, that doesn’tdiminish the diversity and the antagonism.

Q: On the other hand, in some accounts of the failure ofthe AFL-CIO, like Mike Davis’ Prisoners of the AmericanDream, the idea isn’t that multiculturalism is a newphenomenon, but rather that the AFL-CIO couldn’tdeal with or understand the rank-and-file multicultur-alism they already had—that divisions between blacklaborers and white laborers...

RR: That isn’t multiculturalism; it’s straightforwardracial prejudice. Why use the term “culture” for some-thing like anti-semitism or racial segregation? The oldleft tried to get organized labor on the side of civilrights—to support the anti-poll tax, anti-lynching, andanti-segregation laws. With some unions they succeeded,with other unions they failed. It seems much the samenowadays.

worries may recede.

Q: One of the things I found most interesting in“Arguing the World” were the accounts that NathanGlazer and Daniel Bell gave of how they felt when thestudents took over Columbia in ‘68; in some ways theywere quite on their side and yet they were furious thatthe institution of the university was being attacked. Iguess things were slightly different at Princeton, but Iwas wondering how your own institutional locationaffected the way you experienced that period.

RR: I can tell you one story. The night after the studentshad occupied Columbia there was a meeting of purport-edly left faculty in the house of a millionaire professor ofhistory. We were all to discuss the question of why ourstudents were so complacent—why hadn’t they occupiedPrinceton’s buildings? I thought this was the stupidestthing I had ever been asked. Obviously this guy hadmade a big mistake in asking me to the meeting. Imanaged to keep my mouth shut, because I was the onlyperson there who thought they shouldn’t occupy univer-sity buildings. Eventually some students did occupy theadministration building. They were served coffee anddonuts, and eventually went away.

The faculty at Princeton, like the faculty every-where else, organized groups with names like “FacultyAgainst the War in Vietnam.” I was their treasurer, orsecretary, or something of the Princeton group. Wewould go to New York and march through Central Parkand stuff like that. But most of us had no interest in thestudents taking over the university. Every once in a while

Review, with its attention to both politics and culture, asparticipating in a kind of “politics of difference”? Thatis, were these New York Intellectuals trying to consoli-date a cultural identity for themselves in a way familiarto academic or cultural leftism?

RR: I don’t see the analogy. The politics of differencetends to emphasize the cultures of the oppressed. “Youmay not realize it, but the slaves after spending theirsixteen hour day had this terrific culture going; theChicanos, after their sixteen hour day had their terrificculture going.” This kind of thing has nothing to dowith the old Partisan Review, which typically made fun ofthe idea of proletarian culture. After they’d broken withthe Communist Party they had no use for socialistrealism, proletarian art, the culture of the oppressed, oranything of the sort. The group identity that they wereinterested in was the group of New York Intellectuals.For the first time in American history, there were Jewishintellectuals in America as there had been Jewish intel-lectuals in Germany. That was a big enough identity forthem to set up.

Q: They were, though, intimately worried about how toconnect culture with politics—a question that intellec-tuals seem to keep worrying about...

RR: Intellectuals only worry about that question ifthey’ve read enough Marxism to worry about the exis-tence of things called “bourgeois ideals,” “bourgeoisideology,” “bourgeois culture,” “bourgeois intellec-tuals,” and so on. I think as Marx fades away, such

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in the neighborhood. I wonder if you would see that asa case not of outsiders coming into the universitysetting, but of the university overstepping its bounds.

RR: No. The university was just doing what it had doneforever. The radicals just looked for anything that wouldmake the university look bad. The pretexts were trivial.

Q: There seemed to be two ways of looking at theseevents which are not necessarily contradictory. On theone hand, Bell and Glazer were telling the students thatthe university is one of the best institutions of democ-racy; don’t attack that part of it. Critics such as BarbaraEhrenreich have written, though, that some of Bell andGlazer’s anxiety could be seen as a kind of class anxiety—that the university was also the source of their middle-class authority, and by attacking the university, andclaiming that the university is complicit in the warmachine, the students were attacking the ground of Belland Glazer’s cultural authority.

RR: Sure. I don’t think they should have attacked thecultural authority of the professors. It was hard-earned,well-earned authority. Those were the best allies thestudents had.

Q: A lot of people who were new leftists claim thatcultural leftists have nothing to do with the new left. I’mthinking here of Katha Pollitt’s attack after the Sokalaffair on Andrew Ross and the Social Text crowd, and herbeing quite upset that this is what passes for leftism now.

the students would take over or barricade something—some center that was financed by the DefenseDepartment, doing classified research—so we would goand bail them out. But it was just a series of ritualgestures. I think the reason why Princeton wasn’t likeBerkeley or Columbia was the absence of street people.If you weren’t a university student or rich you simplycouldn’t afford to live in Princeton. Whereas Columbiaand Berkeley were near places where people withoutmoney could live.

Q: Are you suggesting that this made the political ques-tions there a little bit more vivid—that there was some-thing more urgent about politics there?

RR: Every drop-out from college in the ‘60s had amotive for staying around the university, and being in onuniversity life by taking part in student demonstrations.It was a culture, if you like, perhaps the most interestingpolitical culture available. If you dropped out of schoolyou just didn’t leave Telegraph Avenue, or the UpperWest Side, or wherever. Nobody knew who was astudent and who wasn’t, so so-called student protestswere usually a mixture of students and former students.

Q: But the particular thing about the demonstrations atColumbia wasn’t so much that people from the outsidewere coming into the university and threatening itsauthority, but that the university actively and perhapswrongfully exerted its authority when they moved eastinto Morningside Park and began construction inHarlem without any notification whatsoever to anyone

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Q: Another of the fairly controversial arguments of thebook is your suggestion that the left drop Marxism andthe vocabulary of Marxism. The first question I have is,what about “socialism”? Is that a term you want to getaway from as well?

RR: Irving Howe asked, years ago, whether if wedropped that term it make any difference to the policieswe advocated. Let’s not worry too much, he said, aboutwhether we call ourselves socialists. I agree with Howethat socialism was the name chosen by the most impor-tant leftist movements of the last 150 years. But now theterm has become radically ambiguous, as demonstratedby the way the British Labour Party split over thenationalization clause. The old guard said: We can’t callourselves a socialist party and sing “The Red Flag”unless we’re for nationalization. Blair and Kinnock saidyes, we can. Howe was, in effect, saying yes, we can.And if you don’t want to call it socialism, don’t call itsocialism. Don’t get hung up on whether it’s socialismor not.

Q: One of my concerns is that I don’t know how we candrop Marxism without dropping a lot of writing that wewould want to hold onto, especially certain kinds ofdissident Marxisms that have been really useful in tryingto think of how we might build something like a socialistor a social democratic movement.

RR: Like what?

Q: Like Gramsci. There’d be a weird kind of repression

RR: I agree with her.

Q: Yet in Achieving Our Country you seem to argue thatthe cultural left is of a piece with the new left.

RR: I didn’t mean to. The argument I wanted to makewas that the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the loss ofpublic confidence in the presidency and the governmentall conspired to move the student radicals into non-majoritarian politics. In other words, the Marxist claimthat the system isn’t reformable came together with thewidespread post-Watergate feeling that the Americangovernment is hopelessly corrupt. This made it very diffi-cult for leftists to think of themselves as Americanpatriots, hoping to achieve their country. But unless theleft wraps itself in the flag, it hasn’t got a chance of prac-ticing a majoritarian politics. Before the ‘60s wrappingyourself in the flag when you did leftist politics was asnatural as breathing. But that became unnatural after the‘60s.

Q: This is the certainly the sort of thing with whichmany readers will take issue—this exhortation to patrio-tism.

RR: One of them already has, actually. I just got agalley of a review by Joel Rogers and Josh Cohen forLingua Franca which says basically, “Who needs patrio-tism if you have moral principles?” My response is thatmoral principles are terrific in Ethics 101, but not asspurs to political action.

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completely irrelevant to what eventually happened. Whykeep it up?

Q: Is it worthwhile, though, to look to some of theanalytic Marxists, or people who are interested in main-taining Marxism, but in a more pragmatic spirit? That is,to take a Marxist line of thought and turn it into some-thing with which to make social policy. I’m thinkinghere of that series that Verso puts out, “Real Utopias,”which includes works by Erik Olin Wright, and JoelRogers and Josh Cohen. They’re interesting in bothcases because they seem to position themselves in aMarxist tradition, but offer local solutions to particularproblems.

RR: Do you think they’d be any worse off if they didn’tposition themselves in a Marxist tradition?

Q: In a vacuum, no, but since they’re speaking in acommunity of other politically minded people who iden-tify themselves as Marxists, and who understand aMarxist vocabulary...

RR: Who are these people? Do people buy bookspublished by Verso?

Q: Yeah.

RR: Maybe, but even if there are still ten thousandpeople who will continue to say, as Derrida says, “wemust read and re-read Marx,” they are fluff on thesurface. It’s an amiable exercise in nostalgia.

involved if we just said, let’s talk about Gramsci withoutever mentioning the fact that he was a Marxist.

RR: Liberal protestants can still quote fanatics likeLuther with a perfectly good conscience. I don’t see whysocial democrats can’t quote Gramsci, or for that matterMarx, with a perfectly good conscience. But it seems tome the kind of leftist who says we must never desertMarx cares more about his own authenticity than aboutwhat might be done. Loyalty to Marx has become afetish.

Q: In some places you’ve criticized Marxist thinking forbecoming too much like a science, like Althusser’s work,which claims to offer something totalizing, pure...

RR: I haven’t the foggiest idea what Althusser meant by“science.” His book seemed to me bullshit from begin-ning to end. I’ve got no conception of what turnedpeople on in Althusser. There were a lot of people whofound him important. But he completely baffles me.

Q: But even the people who aren’t even Althusserians—the people who say that what Marxism does is give us ascience of society, a science of history—obviously that’sone of the things that, as a good pragmatist, you wouldprefer we stop talking about.

RR: It would have been nice if we could have had ascience of society or of history. But for the last couple ofhundred years people have been building philosophies ofhistory and social theories that turned out to be

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Marxists. You have two reasons for forgetting it. First,it’s become a distraction. Second, it’s acquired a badname.

Q: On the other hand, though, you argue in theopening section of Achieving Our Country that, in thesame way that a person needs dignity to understandthemselves, so does a nation. And I thought of E.P.Thompson, who quit the Communist Party in 1956when that made sense, but remained a Marxist—andthat was a way for him to maintain his political dignity.I wonder what you’d say to people for whom Marxism isthat language: the language of dignity and the politicallyhumane. Is it worth maintaining it so as to be able tonarrate your past, and thus to think effectively about thefuture?

RR: Perhaps it’s important for Thompson’s generationto hang on to Marx. I hope that the next generationdoesn’t have to. I don’t see why this has to be passedalong to our children.

THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE

Q: In the first chapter of Achieving Our Country, youdescribed your desire to encourage leftists to see ourcountry as Whitman and Dewey did: as a community inwhich the state and social institutions existed only forthe purpose of making new sorts of individuals possible.This sounds to me like a community devoted to encour-aging difference, and the proliferation of difference, yet

Q: Yet these texts, in particular, situate themselves in apolicy context and are ostensibly marketing themselvesboth to humanities marxists and political science types.There’s some sense that in the crossover market, byhaving quotable bites of Marxist-influenced policyadvice, they could actually influence public policypeople.

RR: It seems a cheap thrill to have readers in bothEnglish and political science. Now if you had readersboth in labor unions and in Congress...

Q: My main question, though, is what do you say topeople who would argue that what Rorty is asking us todo is to repress a Marxist tradition.

RR: How about not repressing it, but taking it fairlylightly? You can argue that if it had not been for Marx,Engels and their friends, we wouldn’t have gotten thewelfare state. Bismarck wouldn’t have been so scared,Lloyd George wouldn’t have been so scared, and so on.You can argue analogously that had it not been forLuther and Calvin we would still be buying indulgences.Both claims are probably true, but do you really want tobother about whether you’re maintaining a Lutheran ora Calvinist tradition?

Q: So you see it as a ladder we have climbed so that itmay be discarded afterwards?

RR: It’s a ladder that is covered with filth because of themarks of the governments that have called themselves

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home, should leave people free to say: I used to be aVietnamese-American, or a Baptist, but now I’m past allthat. They don’t have to say this, but I don’t see whythey should be expected to have any particular loyalty tosuch groups.

Q: But it’s not just loyalty; it’s that this is part of theblind impress...

RR: No, it isn’t. The blind impress is your unconscious.Group identity is what your parents tell you about—what we Vietnamese suffered on the boats, for example,or what we Irish suffered before they took down the“No Irish Need Apply” signs. You can remember thatsuffering, or you can do your best to ignore it—it’s up toyou. Whatever a left politics is, it shouldn’t have viewson which choice a person should make in that situation.

Q: But isn’t this what the politics of difference isabout—clearing a space for that kind of choice? Clearinga space for people to have an association with variouskinds of group identities, and even if they are still goingto call themselves Americans, that American identitydoesn’t get conglomerized into just one banal identity.

RR: It seems to me the politics of difference grows outof the notion that there is something called the WhiteAnglo-Saxon Male Heterosexist culture which was (a) apretty lousy culture, and (b) has insisted that everyonebecome a member of it. I find this an unrecognizabledescription. It wasn’t a bad culture at all. It had quite alot of room for all kinds of religious and ethnic identi-

in other sections of the book you chastise the culturalleft for relying on a politics of difference.

RR: That’s because I’m thinking of individual differencerather than group difference. I don’t care whetheranybody thinks of themselves as Vietnamese-American,Italian-American, or Baptist. I would just like them tobe free to make up their own lives, in a goodNietzschean manner.

Q: Bruce Robbins, in a recent article in Public Culture,“Sad Stories in the International Public Sphere: RichardRorty on Culture and Human Rights,” offers an inter-esting description of culture and difference which maybe useful here: “Culture signifies both membership andidentity on the one hand, and a loose, relativized, self-problematizing relation to membership and identity onthe other.”

RR: In the ideal case it does...

Q: So you think that’s only an ideal case?

RR: Well, it’s a very hard balance to maintain.

Q: Yet in the more sophisticated versions of the politicsof difference, the idea seems to be precisely that we dotry to craft our own individual identities, but we do sobecause we’re part of different communities.

RR: Often we just put the communities behind us.Going to college, growing up, or getting away from

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done a good job of melting ethnicities together intoshared citizenship—being Irish is no longer a stigma, andbeing Hispanic is ceasing to be. But it has done a verybad job of lifting the bar to black-white intermarriage,which seems to me the only way in which black-whiterelations are going to be improved. It has been no betteror worse than any other country in its treatment ofwomen, gays, and lesbians. But these groups don’t needrecognition of their “cultures”; they just need not to bepushed around.

Q: I’d like to get back to this idea that group identity issomething one can either embrace or walk away from. Inthe Robbins article I mentioned earlier, he describes thissituation a bit differently—that one’s relationship to one’s“culture” is going to be both identification and a ques-tioning of this identification. For example, a person willidentify herself as a black person, and yet have a wholebunch of issues about what counts as blackness. Therewill be many situations in which she would say, unprob-lematically, I’m a black person, but in a lot of otherswhere that’s going to be problematized. And this isn’t justsomething intellectuals do—this is something everybodydoes. So when we’re talking about the politics of differ-ence, we have to acknowledge that sophistication.

RR: Yeah, if we’re talking about the politics of difference.But why are we talking about the politics of difference? Ijust don’t see what was wrong with the politics of individ-uality, conjoined with the usual attempt to repeal this orthat law, overcome this or that prejudice, and so on.

ties, associations, parades, things like that. The sensethat there was this vast pressure for homogenizationseems to me a real leftist myth.

Q: So descriptions of, say, women in corporate Americasaying, I have to change the way I act as a woman, toconform to a masculinist corporate ethic...

RR: Oh, sure, that’s perfectly true. When the Irish wentto college in my father’s generation, they had to wear thesame clothes the WASPs wore. I just don’t find this inter-estingly oppressive and homogenizing.

Suppose you have a rhetoric of letting people haveas much space as possible for their individuality, but onewhich simply ignored groups. That, it seems to me,would do as much for women in corporations, or theIrish or the Vietnamese going to college, as any rhetoricthat paid attention to groups.

I want to distinguish sharply between culturaldifferences and stigma. Women have always beenoppressed by men, and gays by straights, but not becausethey have a distinctive feminine, or gay, culture.Oppression of groups is a matter of picking out a groupby possession of some ineradicable stigma and thenhumiliating, enslaving, etc., members of that group. Theproblem for stigmatized groups is not to get their“culture” accepted, but to get the stigmatizers to stopthinking that lack of a penis, black skin, or whatever, is ashameful thing.

So it seems to me a mistake to put stigma andethnicity in the same box—to blur the difference betweenthem with the term “cultural diversity.” America has

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want, you have to have this dignity, you have to be ableto narrate your story, which will involve telling the storyof the group you’re from, the specific things you had toovercome to become the individual you are; and thatstory is going to be inflected, marked—stained in somecases—by the group you come from...

RR: I don’t see what you mean by “marked, inflected,and stained.” You can’t write your autobiographywithout mentioning the stigma you inherited, but thestigmas were somebody else’s idea, not yours.

Q: But what about the very simple fact that, in theculture we live in, your group identity is marked, andyour life chances are limited or expanded as a result ofthat identity, and that there’s got to be some kind ofgesture of recovery to say, “I’m going to embrace thisidentity that I’m told I’m supposed to be ashamed of.”This is a rather powerful tool towards achieving somekind of political and social equality.

RR: That’s one tool among others. You can forget aboutit; you can embrace it; you can do various things inbetween. I guess what bothers me about the politics ofdifference is the suggestion that you have some duty toembrace it rather than forget about it.

I’d say, talk about prejudice rather than groups.Before we knew that there was an African-Americanculture, or a gay culture, or a female identity, we talkedabout blacks, gays, and women getting an unnecessarilyhard time because people were prejudiced against them.I guess I’m not sure that discovering they’ve all got

Q: The question is that if one opens up this rhetoricalspace you suggest, where individuality is central, howdoes one, outside of a politics of difference, narrate thestory of affiliation, disaffiliation, connection, individu-ality? How do you get the dignity to call yourself anindividual in the way that you’d like without coming toterms with this group identity first?

RR: By telling stories about how people walked awayfrom their identification with this or that group—Emersonian type stories.

Q: But that story will be very particular in every case, sothat even though the happy ending is individuality, thenarration itself necessitates a politics of difference.

RR: Why not narrate a politics of contempt for groupdifference, a glorification of individual difference?

Q: That space is available; the politics of difference sayswe don’t have to be fixed, that you can be an individualand this group identity can be something you leavebehind, but the shape of that story is one that will never-theless evoke the earlier difference.

RR: Why is difference now such a big deal? We alwaysknew there were Irish and Italians and Vietnamese andgays and what-not.

Q: I guess it’s a recognition of the kind of trials peopleundergo in being able to achieve their identity. In theprocess by which you’re going to get to the place you

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but for the rest of it, he was creating George BernardShaw. He was quite aware of what the English had doneto the Irish as Joyce or anybody else in Ireland. It takesDaedaluses as well as Shaws to be sure, but I don’t reallysee that there’s any particular reason to go one wayrather than the other. Some people are more likeDaedalus; some people are more like Shaw. Of course,for a black American, it is awfully difficult to wrenchoneself out of the oppression of the blacks in America,and simply be a free Parisian intellectual, thoughWright, Baldwin, and others did try it. Sometimes itworked, and sometimes it didn’t work—but it was alwayshard. It was much easier for an Irishman because theoppression wasn’t as intense, the humiliation wasn’t asgreat. So, depending on just how beat up you’re likely tobe qua member of the group, it is going to be harder oreasier for you to fashion yourself without reference tosome group. But the people who don’t give a damnabout the group are as intellectually and morally respon-sible as the people who do give a damn about the group.

Q: This discussion of the politics of difference remindsme of the fact that, before you started talking about theAmerican left in general, you focused pretty specificallyon feminism—you’ve written a number of articles aboutfeminism—and it seems to be a politics that you’reparticularly attached to.

RR: One is always struck when one finds oneself guiltyof taking things for granted. I was raised phallogocen-tric, homophobic, all the rest of it, and it took decades ofpropaganda to make me realize I’d been raised wrong. If

cultures, or encouraging them to have cultures, hasadded anything.

Q: Could one say that individual identities come from aself-fashioning out of various group identities, and thatyou cobble together the things from traditions that youlike, and leave behind other things that you don’t like,and continually maintain a “double consciousness” orironic relationship to...

RR: Why group identities? Consider the heroine ofSinclair Lewis’s Main Street, growing up in Sauk Center,carving an identity out of the books in the library. It isn’ta bunch of other cultures—its just Keats, Baudelaire, andthe like. I agree with the argument of David Bromwich’sbook, Politics by What Means. Bromwich says that in theold days our sense of ourselves was modeled on SinclairLewis’s heroes and heroines, or Stendahl’s young manfrom the provinces. We used individual models to createa self for ourselves. But now, for some reason, we aresupposed to worry about this other thing—what culturedo we come from? What is our relation to that culture?

Q: What about the model of Stephen Daedalus at theend of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or RalphEllison’s narrator in Invisible Man—people who feel thistremendous push to embrace something they comefrom, and also transcend it and recreate it in a new way?

RR: Yeah, Joyce offers one model, but there are others.Consider George Bernard Shaw, a contemporary ofStephen Daedalus. Shaw wrote one play about Ireland

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and more feminist books. There were dozens of themlying around the house, so I began reading them. If I’dbeen single, God knows whether I would ever have readthem.

THE CULTURAL LEFT AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICS

Q: I wonder if your criticisms of the cultural left’s “theo-reticism,” its need to theorize, is more of a philosophicalobjection than a political one. For your main critique ofthe cultural left seems to be that they are concernedmore with “naming the system” than with craftingspecific reforms. But I wonder if we can’t see that thisnaming the system is similar to what the right did fromthe ‘60s on. Sure, they had a whole bunch of policy posi-tions, but they also concentrated a lot of energy oncultural strategy, on changing the terms of debate,changing the ground on which we argue about publicpolicy. And this is perhaps what the cultural left istrying to do for the reformist left or with the reformistleft, if anything—that naming the system may be a wayof naming lousy vocabularies in which we’re conductingour public conversations, and making some suggestionsabout new vocabularies or new conversations that wouldbe more amenable to the kind of public policy decisionswe would want to have happen.

RR: It’s a nice idea, but I can’t see what new vocabu-laries have been suggested. My feeling is that there’s

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I’d been raised in Europe between the wars, it probablywould have taken decades of post-war propaganda tomake me realize that they shouldn’t have raised me to bean anti-semite. When you have the sense of your eyesbeing opened, you tend to write about how nice it is tohave your eyes open. That’s why I wrote about femi-nism. But it isn’t that I think I have anything special tosay about feminism.

Q: But there’s been a particular interest of feminists inyour work.

RR: Not much. There’ve been some angry replies, but Idon’t think any feminists have picked my stuff up andwaved it as a banner.

Q: Except for Catherine McKinnon.

RR: No. I just stole her stuff and wrote it up in a slightlydifferent form. She hasn’t used me, I’ve used her.

Q: I thought that at a certain point she had drawn onyour anti-foundationalism for some of her work.

RR: She read me before I began writing about feminism,but I don’t think it was a big deal for her.

Q: Is there a story behind when you decided to startwriting about feminism, or is it a more gradual process?

RR: The influence of my wife, if anything—I suspectshe was the principal stimulus. She began reading more

phenomenon. As you say the Republicans have beenbrilliantly successful at doing this. But I can’t see it as anargument for the use of theory. Do the Republicans havea theory?

Q: I guess if you agree that this has been a successfulstrategy that the Right has employed, then we have torecognize that, to be vulgar about it, super-structuralchanges that the Right has enacted have in fact alteredthe economy, have shifted the way money works. Can’twe argue, then, that there’s room for a cultural left,which I would like to think could also work on thatmodel?

RR: How about saying there’s room for a rhetorical left?But the question is: what rhetoric do you use? I thinknothing is going to happen until you can get the massesto stop thinking of the bureaucrats as the enemy, andstart thinking of the bosses as the enemy. I suspect thiswill only happen if there’s a great, huge recession. But Idon’t see the cultural left as doing beans to bring aboutthis shift in the masses’ thinking.

Q: To take it from another angle, what about some ofthe impulses of the cultural left to seize upon this suspi-cion of bureaucrats as one that’s not entirely misguided,and redirecting it towards a left agenda as opposed to aright agenda?

RR: Foucault coming to the aid of Bob Dole? Watch outfor the secret meshes of power?

been a tacit collaboration between right and left inchanging the subject from money to culture. If I werethe Republican oligarchy, I would want a left whichspent all its time thinking about matters of group iden-tity, rather than about wages and hours. I agree that theoligarchy managed to make the term “liberal” a badword, and thus shifted the Democratic Party toward thecenter. It was a rhetorical triumph. The left hasn’tmanaged anything of the sort. What it has done is tocapitalize on the success of the civil rights movement,and to get more and more breaks for various oppressedgroups over the last twenty-five years. It seems to methat all the work of getting those breaks was donewithout notions of “culture.” It was done using the kindof rhetoric Martin Luther King used, modified for theuse of women, gays, and what not. King was not inter-ested in African-American culture. He was interested ingetting African-Americans the life-chances that whitesalways had.

Q: I guess we’re disagreeing on what the term “culture”means. I guess when I say cultural strategy, I mean, forlack of a better term, an ideological strategy thatpresents a world view from which certain decisions canbe made. Over the past 30 years, the Republicans havebeen very good at saying, instead of imagining thewelfare state as this thing we have to ameliorate poverty,see it as an extension of Big Brother.

RR: I don’t want to question the need for bringing apurer sense to the words of the tribe—changing thevocabulary used by the masses to describe this or that

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baiting when red-baiting was unpopular. Because it wasso unpopular, it was done in a sort of cynical, sarcastictone. It’s not a very pleasant tone, but I grew into it, andby the time I started in on this recent stuff it was theonly tone I had. You could probably have a nicer andmore effective tone, but it’s too late for me.

Q: But how about the other side of this equation,though? That perhaps if the cultural left didn’t do allthis posturing—which Robbins describes nicely as areaction formation to their very political irrelevance...

RR: It’s also just a plain ordinary power struggle withinthe academy for who gets the tenure slots. If you don’tmake a helluva lot of noise, the chance that any of yourgeneration is going to get anywhere in the business isfairly small. So you have to exaggerate the importance ofthe difference between you and them, just as Howe’sgeneration had to pretend that all things had becomenew when we became modern, that human nature reallyhad changed in 1910, that literary modernism was a newbirth of time—not really true, but useful for purposes ofbreaking into the system and getting a place in the sun.

Q: One of the significant differences between yourselfand many on the cultural left is that your writing seemsdirected toward those who are, relatively speaking,powerful. The questions you ask often take the form of,“How should we residents of rich North Atlanticdemocracies, or we liberal intellectuals who have somecultural capital, act?” In other words, the concern is withhow the powerful should act toward the less powerful. In

Q: I don’t know if we can see this as purely falseconsciousness if someone who is a welfare client findsthe welfare state to be invasive as well as helpful. There’sa certain way we can build upon this...

RR: Of course they find it invasive, but what do youexpect?

Q: A less invasive welfare state? Why not draw fromsome of this populist fear of large bureaucratic structuresand craft a less statist kind of leftism that can still do thekinds of things that we want the welfare state to do?

RR: Does anybody know how to run a non-invasivewelfare system? I don’t think you can. You’re just goingto have to settle for lots and lots of Foucauldian webs ofpower, about as weblike and powerful as they alwayswere, only run by the good guys instead of the bad guys.

Q: Without discounting the significant substantivedisagreements between you and many on the culturalleft, I keep wondering if it’s possible that, to some signif-icant degree, the conflict is the product of tone andrhetoric—that you dislike their revolutionary posturing,emphasis on righteous anger, and infatuation with theo-retical language, and they dislike your casual, laidbackand some would say even complacent tone. In addition,your rhetoric tends to be on the debunking, simplifyingside, and theirs on the complexifying side. Do you thinkthis is a significant part of it?

RR: Oh, yeah. I think so. Remember that I grew up red-

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Q: And this is reflected in both Achieving Our Countryand articles like “Two Cheers for Elitists,” your reviewof Christopher Lasch’s last book. In these places, youmake an unabashed defense of top-down initiatives. Butwhat about the idea that all knowledges are partial,imminent knowledges, and that the things you thinkshould be done are in part a product of where you’respeaking from?

RR: The masses always knew that. The intellectualsalways knew that. Everybody’s always taken this forgranted. The first thing you say when you hear a polit-ical speech is something like “well, that’s what it lookslike to him.” But I can’t see that Foucault or anybodyelse has given us new insight into the tediously familiarfact that your views are usually a product of yourcircumstances.

Q: How can one acknowledge this point in one’s writingand still say something useful, though?

RR: Why bother? Why not let my audience acknowl-edge it for me? Everybody knows that I’m an overpaid,privileged humanities professor. They knew it beforethey read my stuff. Why should I bother with self-flagel-lation?

Q: This reminds me of the labor conference atColumbia a few years back. It seemed to me that thepoint of that conference was to bring intellectuals incloser contact with the labor movement.

contrast, a lot of leftist cultural studies work seems towrite from the other side of the equation—writing insolidarity with the less powerful. Whatever the pitfallsand shortcomings are of this position, it seems to resultin a different kind of politics. In other words, you’regoing to end up with two very different kinds of politics,depending upon which audience you feel you are writingfor. I was wondering if you could imagine writing anessay which is more concerned with arguing what theless powerful should do, not how the more powerfulshould act toward the less powerful. Is it possible towrite with that kind of solidarity, or does it seem like afalse kind of solidarity?

RR: Roosevelt said early in his first administration that,“If I were working for an hourly wage, I would join alabor union.” This was a very important moment in thehistory of the labor movement. Was he speaking fromthe side of the less powerful? No. I could say to thejanitors at the University of Virginia, for God’s sake joina union. Would that be speaking from their side? No.But it’s good advice anyway, even if it can be viewed ascondescending.

This whole idea of solidarity with the oppressed onthe part of the bourgeois intellectual strikes me as one ofthe many phony problems that we inherited fromMarxism. John Stuart Mill didn’t worry about whetherhe was solid with the women or the workers—he justgave his views. The Marxist trope of “Jones is just abourgeois intellectual” never did anybody any good. Itisn’t something anybody should spend their timeworrying about.

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give up on group identity, and was furious at the sugges-tion that he switch from race to class.

Q: One of the things I found most interesting aboutRogers’ speech was his set of answers to the question,“What can intellectuals do for the labor movement?”Pretty much everything that came out of his mouth afterthat was, if you’re a sociologist, or a political scientist, ora researcher in labor relations, here are things you cando. But the thing you don’t want to do is deconstructfairy tales, which is what they do in English depart-ments.

RR: This review by Cohen and Rogers says, “He’s justtalking to Humanities teachers,” and I read that andthought, “Of course I am!” Who did they think I wastalking to? Humanities teachers are people, too.

Q: Another point about the conference that youremarked on in Achieving Our Country was the booing ofOrlando Patterson, and the way that pointed up atension between different sides of the left concerningwhat we should do in the age of global capitalism: doyou keep borders open, or do you close them?

RR: Right. Do you save the working classes of theadvanced old democracies by protectionism, or do yougive up protectionism for the sake of the Third World?Do you try to keep the standard of living in the olddemocracies up in order to prevent a right-wingpopulist, fascist movement in the USA, or do you try tore-distribute the wealth across national borders? You

RR: No, I think the point was for Sweeney and theAFL-CIO to get some media attention—attention theyneed and deserve. The only way to bring intellectualstogether with the labor movement is for the AFL-CIOto tell the professors, for example, that Senator Whositshas introduced a bill to change the NLRB rules forrecognition of unions to incorporate the recommenda-tions of the Duncan commission. That then gets theintellectuals to bang the drums, mention the WhositsAct every time they turn around, drag it into everyconversation, and so on. That’s about as much bringingthe intellectuals together with the union workers as youare going to get. The intellectuals are supposed to givevoice to desirable initiatives. In the past, they’ve giventheir voices to the repeal of the anti-sodomy laws andthe equalization of male-female wages. So now let themgive voice to the Whosits Act, because the NLRB is amess. I don’t really care about whether there’s solidaritybetween these two social groups, as long as they areserving the same ends.

Q: What was your own sense of the conference?

RR: I’d agreed to give a paper in Colorado the secondday of the conference. So I didn’t see much of it. You gotthe tensions you would expect: between people like JoelRogers who are out there getting people to run forschool boards and city council, all involved in the nittygritty, and people like me and Patricia Williams. We juststay in our studies and compose ever more effective littlebits of rhetoric. The tension between Todd Gitlin andRobin Kelley was another thing. Kelley was not about to

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can’t get really excited about how much money the TAsget. I can get upset about employing adjuncts. It seemsto me that for the three or four years that you are a TA,the university says that in exchange for starving for thesethree or four years, you’re getting a chance at a bettercareer than you would have gotten if you had taken a jobfor real money. Maybe that’s a fair trade. It’s not a veryconclusive argument, but it’s an argument. I just don’thave strong views one way or another. Adjuncts, on theother hand, seem to me quite capable of wrecking thesystem. You could de-professionalize higher educationby hiring enough adjuncts. You could eliminate facultycontrol, take away the role of the universities as sanctu-aries of the left, as sanctuaries of tolerance...all the rolesit has played in post-war America. If you completelycommodify academic labor you can get all the teachingdone for roughly a third of what you can get it done fornow. But I hope they don’t completely commodify acad-emic labor. It would proletarianize the faculty, and takeaway whatever cultural and political clout universitiescurrently have.

Q: Wasn’t it Dewey who helped found the AAUP? Iwonder if there are other organizations that we need toinvent to try to stem this tide?

RR: The AAUP is a really difficult topic, and somebodyshould write a history of it. It has less clout than it hadbefore the ‘60s. In the ‘70s it went out on all kinds oflimbs, and it left its membership way behind. TheAAUP got in the hands of ‘60s radicals who staked it outin positions which lost it huge sections of its member-

probably can’t do both. I wish I knew how to resolve thedilemma, but I don’t.

When I was a kid, I knew just what I would doin foreign and domestic policy if I were President.Nowadays I don’t. I think this is a fairly widespreadphenomenon. Forty years ago, you could believe that theU.S., through the U.N., could export democracy,squeeze the evil empire to death, create industrialization,and promote a rising standard of living throughout theworld. I don’t believe that anymore. It can’t be done.How do you save the Asian economies without giving allthe money to American and Japanese banks? I have noidea. Or consider Mexico. We in effect ruined theMexican middle class by paying off American banks.There ought to be a way to avoid this, but I don’t knowwhat it is.

Q: The Columbia labor teach-in had been preceded, bya few months, by a labor struggle which caught theattention of a lot of academics: the Yale TA strike. Iwould be curious to hear your response to this event,especially given your comments about the relationshipbetween labor and intellectuals, because this is onemoment where the intellectuals are labor. Now assomeone who has been in the academy for quite a longtime now, I’m wondering what your reflections are onwhere we’re going and what sort of things can be doneto improve the state of higher education, to improve thestate of the laborers in higher education: faculty, gradstudents, and other university workers.

RR: The adjuncts worry me a lot more than the TAs. I

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non-academic employees. The idea would be that youcouldn’t raise the faculty 3% and raise the non-acade-mics only 1%, and you couldn’t have a median wage forthe staff that was less than half of the median for thefaculty. There must be some such set of rules that youcould institute. If such rules became a custom among theprivate universities, it would probably spread. The facul-ties of the big powerful state universities would say, “I’membarrassed to be teaching here at Berkeley where theratio is 3 to 1 instead of 2 to 1, as it is at Harvard orStanford.” I’d like the universities to be a moral example.They’d be more of a moral example if they fixed it sothat janitors with 20 years experience didn’t get paid lessthan assistant professors, then if they doubled the payfor TAs.

Q: Let’s return for a moment to the stigma vs. moneyquestion, because this seems to be an important point inAchieving Our Country. The first obvious question is, canyou imagine talking about both at the same time?

RR: Sure.

Q: So it’s not as if what you’re arguing for is that westop talking about stigma.

RR: No, but we might divide our libidinal energy inhalf.

Q: Or even maybe not dividing it in half, but talkingabout both at the same time.

ship. I would love to bring the AAUP back to the powerit once had, but I don’t know how I’d do it. Benningtonwould have been inconceivable in the ‘50s. Now theuniversity presidents are so contemptuous of the AAUPthat they say “ah screw it, censure me.” They reallydidn’t say that then.

Q: But, getting back to your earlier point, one of thereasons why TAs are so angry is that we can no longerjustify four years of starvation because of the ratheruncertain promise of an academic job.

RR: The TAs who accept four years of starvation inexchange for a one in ten chance of getting a job usuallyhave parental support. I think one reason why we getthe graduate enrollments we do is simply the savings ofthe parents of the current crop. The next generationwon’t have those parental savings to draw on. So wewon’t have all these applicants for graduate study.

Q: That’s one of the other things that worries a lot ofus. The next generation of academics will only consist ofpeople who had enough money for graduate school. Sowe won’t have a next generation of working classscholars.

RR: The universities do have the chance to do some-thing for economic equality. Eric Lott, Susan Fraiman,and Nelson Lichtenstein held a rally a while back for thenon-academic employees at the University of Virginia.Sometime I want to write out a proposal that the facul-ties of the universities tie their own wages to those of the

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RR: Fine, if you can do it, do it. But offhand, I don’tknow how to run the two together.

Q: It seems that that’s what the recent work on white-ness studies is trying to do.

RR: What’s that?

Q: This idea that you start talking about whiteness as aracial identity just like any other racial identity.

RR: [groans] God.

Q: Think about the quote from DuBois about thewages of whiteness—the idea that white workers wereconvinced that, while they were oppressed, they werestill better off than the blacks. So they were encouragednot to align themselves with the blacks, because of thebenefits derived from their white skin.

RR: That was what Gompers said about the Irish. It’san age-old technique: dividing the oppressed into hostilegroups so they won’t vote against you.

Q: Fred Pfeil has a piece called “Sympathy for theDevils: Notes on Some White Guys in the RidiculousClass Wars,” and the interesting thing there is that helocates the absence of whites from these conversations inthe same way that you do, and what he ends up saying is,let’s try to understand why a militia politics happens.The idea is that there’s some way that you can get toclass through a more fully articulated discussion of race,

RR: See, that’s the thing. Whenever I say this to NancyFraser, she says, “You don’t seem to realize that ques-tions of race and gender are inseparable from economicquestions.” I always reply, “Of course they’re sepa-rable.” For example, lots of white males don’t get goodenough jobs. So if you want a majoritarian politics thenyou may want to separate talk about the level of theminimum wage from talking about race and gender.The dream of the left, particularly after Marxismseemed to have given us such a beautiful way of tyingthings together, is that we can integrate all of ourconcerns into a single consolidated vision. But usuallywe can’t. We have to say one thing to one audience atone time and other things to other audiences at othertimes.

Q: One of the arguments that seems rather persuasive tome is that, given the racial composition of the workingclass and the poor, if white intellectuals interested inclass are silent on race, or at least hold that these issuesare separable, it will look like a class movement beingcrafted for white workers only. The danger is that blackswon’t feel that they’re part of the movement.

RR: And the danger of the academy’s concentration onrace and gender is that white workers think they werebeing neglected by the academy. So you’re going to loseeither way. The white workers are being neglected.

Q: The question is, some people argue that it is possiblethat we can do this, that we can talk about both at thesame time.

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not sure that the Roman plebes didn’t know that. I thinkthe idea that Marx burst upon an astonished world withthe thought that the rich were ripping off the poor isweird.

Q: But isn’t it more than just the rich ripping off thepoor? It’s that it’s being done in a certain way, so to stopit, we’re going to have to address the certain way it’shappening.

RR: But he didn’t address it. He said that nothing couldchange without a total revolution, one which abolishedprivate property, created new ideals to replace bourgeoisfreedom and bourgeois independence, and so on. Therhetoric was entirely one of “No piecemeal solutions.”The left got hooked on this no piecemeal solutions idea,and on the claim that if you do propose solutions they’dbetter be integrated in a general theoretical package. Butmost of the good has been done by piecemeal initiativesthat came out of left field. Stonewall came out of leftfield. Selma came out of left field.

There’s a new book coming out by Richard Posner,in which he talks about the difference between academicmoralists and moral entrepreneurs. It’s sort of a polemicagainst Dworkin and other Kantian moral philosophers.He distinguishes academic moralists, who have a moraltheory which tells us that we must do so and so, frommoral entrepreneurs, like Catherine McKinnon. She ishis paradigm of a moral entrepreneur. She doesn’t have atheory—she has a polemic. Most of the good is done byopportunistic moral entrepreneurs, who have a veryspecific target, call attention to a very specific set of

because there’s a way to talk about what it is that thesepeople are missing, and what’s offered in its place in themilitias.

RR: Consider Clinton’s last State of the Union Address:something for everybody, no overall integration ofpolicy: just I propose this and I propose that. That’sabout as much integration as politics needs. I think ofthe intellectual left as dominated by the notion that weneed a theoretical understanding of our historical situa-tion, a social theory which reveals the keys to the futuredevelopment, and a strategy which integrates everythingwith everything. I just don’t see the point. I don’t seewhy there shouldn’t be sixteen initiatives, each of whichin one way or another might relieve some suffering, andno overall theoretical integration.

Q: It might be that some of this thinking is that the leftisn’t quite sure what those initiatives should be, and thatwhile the theorizing may occasionally become a fetish, itcan also be a way of stepping back to one remove fromthe situation in order to get a clearer view, so we canthen see what the more specific initiatives should be.

RR: It never worked before. Why should it work now?

Q: But what about the Marxist insight of taking a stepback from the economy and saying, the economy in abig way works this way, thus our specific local practicesshould be unionizing the workers and organizing them.

RR: It didn’t take Marx for that. Cobbet knew that, I’m

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raphy. When I mentioned ethnography, it was in thecontext of a bazaar surrounded by private clubs, animage I used in a reply to Geertz. Suppose that becamethe model for a global society. There would still be somepeople who would always be trying to become membersof the club on the other side of the bazaar. Those wouldbe the intellectually curious people who read novels,history, and anthropology. There would be other peoplewithout such curiosity. I still think of a bazaarsurrounded by private clubs as a good model for a globalcivilization. But with luck, the clubs would have someexchange memberships.

Q: Do we, following Bruce Robbins, need more than“sad sentimental stories” for a genuine internationalpolitics?

RR: Genuine international politics would mean workingtoward a democratic world government. We need thecountries of the world to do what the American coloniesdid when they federated. It took a lot for the Quakers toovercome their hostility to the Catholics across theMason-Dixon line. But they managed it. Same thinghappened when Tito, after the war, enforced an end toethnic cleansing. The Yugoslav federation worked for awhile. One thing that makes federations work is a sad,sentimental story about past ethnic, racial, and nationalhostilities.

Q: Well, the thing that struck me about Robbins’ articlewas that it emphasized NGOs as a crucial tool towardbeing able to develop a kind of a critical plurality of

instances of unnecessary suffering. Later on the acad-emic moralists and social theorists come along and tieeverything up in a neat package. But this latter activityusually doesn’t lead to political results.

Q: What about Habermas’s fear that local solutions mayclear up one kind of suffering while exacerbating anotherkind of suffering somewhere else?

RR: He’s absolutely right. I think this will continue tohappen until the end of time. All social initiatives haveunforeseen, and often bad, side effects. The idea thatyou can step back and fix it so that your initiative won’tinterfere with anybody else’s initiative is crazy. It’s ascrazy as the idea that someday the meshes of the webs ofpower will be less tight than they are now.

THE INTERNATIONAL

Q: You talk about ethnography and the novel as twogenres of ironist liberal education or edification. Andwhile the novels get talked about a lot, specific ethnogra-phies rarely come up: how has the ethnographic tradi-tion in anthropology influenced you?

RR: Think of ethnography as being done by historiansas well as by anthropologists. Talk about the culture ofthe Socratic Circle, of the Roman Republic, of theRenaissance city-state. These are just as good ethnogra-phies as those of the Trobrianders. Before they inventedanthropology, we were getting all the benefits of ethnog-

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about where the international capital can go. It is moreand more the proper site of class conflict now.

RR: If we don’t do it at the nation-state level, it isn’tgoing to be done at all.

THE MARGINS OF PHILOSOPHY

Q: Perhaps we might shift to more philosophically-oriented issues here. Can you remember what it was likenot to be a pragmatist?

RR: I desperately wanted to be a Platonist—to becomeone with the One, to fuse myself with Christ or God orthe Platonic form of the Good or something like that.Pragmatism was a reaction formation.

Q: When did you start to have doubts about thisPlatonic ideal?

RR: In my twenties. Remember I already had an M.A. inphilosophy when I was twenty, so I had been in the busi-ness for quite a while.

Q: But unless my sense of your academic history isskewed, it seems like in the ‘50s and ‘60s, you were stillwriting fairly straightforward analytic philosophy.

RR: It wasn’t quite like that. My first job was atWellesley, where I realized that I had been badlyeducated for a career teaching philosophy in the U.S.

political positions. Instead of just having monoculturestalking to each other, each nation is revealed to have allsorts of internal divisions that need to be played out.

RR: The stuff about NGOs in Robbins’ article remindsme of Lasch’s thing that I quoted in Achieving OurCountry about wanting to declare a separate peace withour opposite numbers in the communist countries. No,we don’t; we want to abolish the governments of thosecountries. We want a situation in which the next time aMilosevic tries it, there are so many blue helmets aroundthe gangs can’t get organized. We want a global federa-tion so that the next time there’s a Saddam Hussein, theAmerican congress doesn’t decide to make war—theworld parliament decides.

Q: This actually brings us to another point in theRobbins’ article—I would like to hear what you have tosay about it. He makes the claim that, on your model ofthe public/private split, the international sphere isprivate, while the public coincides with the nation-state.

RR: Why does he say the public coincides with thenation-state? Because I’m patriotic? All good liberalinternationalists who are sentimental about the UnitedStates are also sentimental about the United Nations.

Q: I read an article recently by Ellen Meiksins Woodarguing that just because we have this rhetoric of global-ization, it doesn’t mean that the nation-state doesn’tmatter; it fact, it probably matters more. The nation-state is still there for people who are making the deals

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my best to sound like all the other guys, at least for awhile.

Q: And if I’m not mistaken, Princeton was something ofcenter for analytic philosophy in America?

RR: It still is—the top-ranked department. Numberone. We used to get messages from Harvard saying“we’re only number two—we try harder.”

Q: However, many suggest that your work has shakenthe dominance of analytic philosophy. Berel Lang wrotethe following in 1990 about both your role as presidentof the Eastern Division of the American PhilosophicalAssociation during its 1979 convention, as well as theinfluence of your Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,published in that same year: “It may be too much or evenyet too early to claim that the landscape of Americanphilosophy, institutionally but to an extent also substan-tively, would not be the same after the events of 1979; aswith most stirrings in the history of ideas, Rorty’s revi-sionism was undoubtedly symptomatic as well as causal.But there is no question that in the decade between 1979and 1989 significant changes occurred in the professionof American philosophy—and that Rorty was andremains a central figure in this process.”

RR: I think that’s wrong. No big changes occurred, andI was never a central figure. 1979 looks big to Berelbecause the unreconstructed Yalies, the ones who hadn’tretooled themselves, were the center of the so-calledpluralist movement. Their faction, made up of everybody

Analytic philosophy was taking over. But my own grad-uate school, Yale, had blinded itself to this fact. So Ididn’t learn enough analytic philosophy. When I got toWellesley, I found that all my colleagues had gone toHarvard, and were up to date not only with Quine butwith Austin. So I threw myself into reading Quine,Wittgenstein, Austin—all the stuff my colleagues weretalking about. I retooled myself so as to become ananalytic philosopher.

Q: What kind of education did you get at Yale?

RR: It was entirely pre-analytic at Yale. They were themost reactionary of U.S. philosophy departments untilquite recently. The department was put into receivershipsome years back, and started up again with a bunch ofanalytic philosophers. But in those days, if you wanted acareer, it was the wrong place to study. Yale had offeredme a fellowship, and Harvard hadn’t, so I went to Yale. Itwas decisive for the kind of training I got. If I had goneto Harvard, my career would have been utterly different.So I had to quickly fix myself up during three years atWellesley, and again during my first few years atPrinceton. I tried desperately to find out what the hellmy colleagues were talking about, to get in on the discus-sions, and so on. After a while, I began writing papers onphilosophy of mind. That was because the one analyticphilosopher I really cared for was Wilfrid Sellars, and hiswork was largely in that area. I think it would be accurateto say that up until 1963 or so, I wasn’t doing analyticphilosophy because I didn’t know how. Then, because Icouldn’t have survived at Princeton any other way, I did

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philosophical journals, and it sold slowly at first. Verygradually, in the course of the ‘80s, people started to readit, and eventually it did gain a certain momentum. Butthere was no dramatic turn and no spotlight. My stuffwas continuous with what a lot of people had been doingin various areas: Sellars, Putnam, and Davidson, forexample. Since Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,American analytic philosophy has gone on its merry waywithout any noticeable attention to any of this stuff.Sellars is still largely unread. I’m read mostly by peopleoutside philosophy. Putnam is jeered at as someone whohas gone soft.

Q: Maybe we could talk a little bit about how your audi-ence started to widen, and reach the humanities peoplewho wouldn’t otherwise read what was going on inphilosophy departments.

RR: In so far as I’ve had an influence, it’s been almostentirely on people outside of philosophy. I don’t knowwhy they read my book. I was glad they liked it.

Q: It seems that, just at the moment the deconstructivewave was crashing through American academies, youprovided a homegrown post-foundationalism that youdidn’t have to be in a French department to hear about.

RR: Yeah, if you wanted non-foundational soundingstuff, mine was as good as any.

Q: Since you then moved on to become a professor ofthe humanities, rather than a philosophy professor, was it

in American philosophy who wasn’t analytic, got amajority for their candidate for president of the EasternDivision of the APA. My sympathies were with himbecause he was the underdog, and the analytic establish-ment was being very arrogant. I was president that year,and I made a crucial parliamentary ruling in his favor.I’ve never been forgiven by the analytic philosophers forthat. I’ve also never been liked or trusted by the plural-ists. I managed to fall neatly between two stools.

Q: Lang does mention that you did play the crucial roleas mediator at the convention.

RR: I wasn’t a mediator. I did encounter the leader ofthe analytic thugs, who said, “I have here the crucialmembership documents, and I want you to throw outpluralist votes.” I said, “Don’t tell me what to do,goddamn it,” and charged out, boiling mad. I though theanalytic establishment was being overbearing and thug-gish.

Q: It does seem though that 1979 was the year where thedrift toward pragmatism that you’d been engaging in forthe past seven years was suddenly in the spotlight.

RR: Nah.

Q: No?

RR: Remember Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hadn’tbeen published in 1979. People only started gettingcopies in 1980. Also, it got mostly bad reviews in all the

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Q: It seems that it’s not only the case that professors ofliterature were becoming more interested in your work,but that you were becoming more interested in writingabout literature.

RR: This too was opportunistic. Just as I wouldn’t havewritten Achieving Our Country if Harvard hadn’t asked meto give the Massey lectures, I wouldn’t have dared writeabout Orwell if Trinity College, Cambridge hadn’t askedme to give the Clark lectures. The Clarks had to havesome relation to literature. I was honored by the invita-tion and thought, “it can’t be that hard.”

Q: It seems to me that those sections, those on Nabokovand Orwell, are among the most persuasive inContingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Your arguments aboutcruelty and re-description are fleshed out really nicely inthose chapters.

RR: I’m glad you think so. A lot of people thought thatthe book was just carelessly thrown together: essays onthis and that. You never really know when you write abook whether the chapters are just one thing and thenanother thing, or whether there is some overall messagethat the reader can pick up on. If you’re lucky, there is.The most devastating review came from BernardWilliams, one of the best analytic philosophers in thebusiness. He trashed it, saying that the book had nounity, that it was just a mess. A lot of people didn’t seeany point, or any unity.

also your conscious decision to align yourself withliterary theory?

RR: No, it was repulsion rather than attraction. That is,what I wanted was a job that was not in a philosophydepartment. I didn’t care what kind of job it was, so longas I didn’t have to go to any more philosophy departmentmeetings. When Don Hirsch (who hired me at Virginia)called me up and asked, “Hey, do you want to be anEnglish professor,” I said I’d come if I could be a non-departmental university professor. I hadn’t thought aboutmoving in the direction of English. It was just that I got acall from the chair of an English department who neededsomebody to teach philosophy to English graduatestudents.

Q: What is your position at Stanford going to be?

RR: Professor of Comparative Literature. When itcomes to finding jobs, I have been always dependent onthe kindness of professors of literature. In this case, theequivalent of Don Hirsch was Sepp Gumbrecht. When Iwas at Stanford in 1996-7, he invited me to come to hisphilosophy discussion group. Like all German scholars,he thinks American graduate students don’t know enoughabout philosophy. (Compared to German students, ofcourse, they don’t.) He’s in comparative literature, so thejob he cooked up for me is as professor of comparativeliterature. But I’ll still be teaching philosophy to litera-ture students, just like I have been doing at UVa. I didn’tcare about the title. I suggested I be called TransitoryProfessor of Trendy Studies, but nobody liked the idea.

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think it’s inauthentic to talk Christian, or to talk Marxist.You use whatever phrases the audience learned whengrowing up, and you apply them to the objects at hand.

Q: Some people would say, though, that without some-thing like the belief in the Church, the civil rights move-ment couldn’t have happened.

RR: Maybe so. I don’t know. Religion is less importantnow than 100 years ago. The tide of faith has ebbed.Lots of people are commonsensically secular in a waythat their ancestors couldn’t have been commonsensi-cally secular. I certainly don’t think we have to get backto Christianity, or Marxism, or any other absolutist viewin order to get anything political done.

Q: It struck me that the gay liberation movement standsas a movement that didn’t have a religious or absolutistbase.

RR: Yeah, the message was just “leave us alone.” Notbecause we are X, or you are Y, or the world is Z. Justget off our backs.

Q: I wonder again about when Cornel West “talksChristian”: when you mobilize that kind of language forpolitical purposes, are you maintaining a kind of anti-foundationalist position while encouraging a foundation-alism in others.

RR: Well, this is where the private/public distinctioncomes in. I think that the shared hope is public and the

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ANTI-FOUNDATIONALISM

Q: Rogers and Cohen, among others, have suggestedthat you have a dismissive attitude toward the sort ofabsolutist beliefs with which a lot of leftist movementshave generated strength: the use of Christianity in thecivil rights movement, and so on. How would yourespond?

RR: The next book I wrote after Contingency came outin German and French. It was called Hope Instead ofKnowledge. It was supposed to be a reply to that kind ofcriticism. I argued that if you have hope, it didn’t reallymatter whether you believe that Christ was the son ofGod, or that there are universal human rights. Theessential thing is to dream of a better world. Hopedoesn’t require justification, cognitive status, founda-tions, or anything else.

Q: I wonder in that case how one would practice prag-matism politically, especially considering the number ofAmericans still influenced by religion. I heard CornelWest once talk about how something like 95% ofAmericans believe in God, and 85% believe that Godloves them. That being the case: does the pragmatist tryto mobilize these kinds of belief in, I guess, a Leninistway?

RR: Whatever works: Cornel talks Christian; otherpeople talk Marxist; I talk pragmatist. I don’t think itmuch matters as long as we have the same hopes. I don’t

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philosophers have our own questions, topics, answers,arguments. Knowing zilch about those, Weinbergshouldn’t get into an argument with Kuhn, even thoughhe was right about Social Text.

Q: Is this a sign of scientists feeling like the philosoph-ical rug is being pulled out from under them?

RR: Yeah, like the priests, they like to think they have aprivileged relation to reality. I doubt they do, but onemight expect that they would resent it if told they don’t.When the priests of the 19th century were told by prac-titioners of philological higher criticism of the Bible thatthey were in the service of middle-eastern creationmyths, they didn’t like it. In the middle of this century,the physicists didn’t like it when Kuhn told them theywere just trying to solve puzzles.

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

Q: Let’s close on a few questions that have been raisedby the public/private split you have suggested. A lot hasbeen written about the private/public split in the 10years since you first articulated that position inContingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It might be nice tohave you now, ten years down the line, offer any clarifi-cations that you would like to emphasize.

RR: The original misinterpretation came from NancyFraser, who said “Rorty didn’t realize the personal is thepolitical.” I think she and I were at cross purposes. I was

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Weltanschauung justification in the background can stayprivate. John Rawls says that in a pluralistic societyeveryone has their own notion of the meaning of life,but it doesn’t get in the way of politics because theyagree to keep it out of the public sphere. That seems agood idea.

THE SOKAL AFFAIR

Q: Speaking of controversies over foundationalism, whatwas your response to the Sokal Affair?

RR: I wrote a reply to Stephen Weinberg’s piece.Weinberg had an article in the New York Review of Bookson the Sokal affair, which was divided into two halves.The first part said “anybody like the editors of Social Textwho are so illiterate about science as to publish thisnonsense ought to at least know they’re illiterate. Theyought at least to have some humility.” That wasabsolutely right. The second part was a polemic againstKuhn and all his ilk on the grounds that physicists knewtheir own relation to reality, and Kuhn didn’t. Itamounted to saying “for any given discipline, you don’tneed a philosophical discussion of the relation of thisdiscipline to the rest of the universe because themembers of the discipline know the answers to all of thephilosophical questions that could be asked about thatdiscipline.” I wrote a polemic, saying that Kuhn couldbe right or Kuhn could be wrong, we pragmatists couldbe right or wrong, but qua physicists, Weinberg and hiscolleagues had no special insight into the matter. We

positive recommendation about how everybody shouldbehave.

Q: A therapeutic point.

RR: Right. Recently, I wrote a couple of articles on apragmatist philosophy of religion. I agree with Jamesthat there needn’t be a conflict between science and reli-gion because they serve different ends. They needn’tcross. Metaphysics was the place where they crossed, andso much the worse for metaphysics. It’s essentially thesame argument as in Contingency: we contain copresentbut distinct sets of equally coherent sets of desires.These may not always be able to be made coherent withone another, but they may not be any the worse for that.Plato was wrong: you don’t have to get everything to gettogether.

Q: And what would you say to criticisms that yourironism means a kind of sneering-at earnest liberals whodon’t want to acknowledge the contingency of their ownvalues?

RR: That was certainly the way it came across. But whatI wanted to say was: take yourself with some lightness.Be aware of yourself as at the mercy of the contingenciesof your upbringing and your culture and your environ-ment. I thought of it myself as offering advice ratherthan insults. My liberal ironist doesn’t go around beingironic to everybody she meets. She saves the irony forherself. The liberal part is public and the irony part isprivate.

thinking of one sense of private, something likeWhitehead’s definition of religion: “what you do withyour solitude.” Fraser was thinking of the private as thekitchen or bedroom, as opposed to the marketplace andthe office. There was no relevance to what I was saying.

Q: I can understand keeping your will toward self-creation private if you’re Nietzsche—in fact, I’d recom-mend it. On the other hand, take someone likeWhitman, whom you discuss in Achieving Our Country:Whitman’s will toward self-creation involved otherpeople, affected other people, and you acknowledge thatit had its influence finally. What do you say to theperson whose sense of poetic self-creation requires otherpeople and the opportunity for public transformation?

RR: I would tell her to go into politics. I didn’t sayeverybody had a public/private split, but some peopledo. There is a spectrum here. Some people have nopublic consciousness. This is the case of the sociopath;he simply doesn’t think that there are any moral subjectsout there. There are also a lot of other solitaries:hermetic poets who don’t care if they have an audience.At the other extreme, there are people who have aminimal inner life. Their happiness consists entirely ofbeing the soccer coach, or being the pater familias, orbeing chair of the Rotary Club. My public/privatedistinction wasn’t an explanation of what every humanlife is like. I was, instead, urging that there was nothingwrong with letting people divide their lives along theprivate/public line. We don’t have a moral responsibilityto bring the two together. It was a negative point, not a

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sure everybody’s free and equal, and the private sphereis where you actually get to have fun. And I think a lotof people want to talk about the public sphere as a placewhere certain kinds of self-actualization happen.

RR: I don’t think anything I’ve said implies that self-actualization only happens in private. Some people takeno pleasure in other people—only in their own solitude.Some people do the reverse. Most of us are in between.That’s the spectrum I was talking about earlier.

Q: As part of your argument for the public/private split,you argue that the last conceptual revolution in politicalthought we will need was J.S. Mill. Is that the best thingwe can hope for in a political philosophy?

RR: I just can’t think of anything I learned from post-Mill writings that added much. It’s just a report on myown reading, or maybe a little more than that. There isa book by Bernard Yack called The Longing for TotalRevolution. One good thing about Mill is that he doesn’thave that longing. The longing was the product ofspecifically neo-Kantian strains of thought. These didn’treach England, at least enough to affect Mill. As soon asyou think that total reconceptualizations are necessaryfor political thinking, you’ve already separated fromreformist politics and are on your way toward Leninism.

Q: What do you say to enemies of the welfare state whowould use Mill to argue that the government stay out ofthe way of the private sphere?

Q: But regarding this suggested split, Simon Critchlyasks: “how can one be a Nietzschean ironist in theprivate sphere, which would mean understanding liberalprinciples of tolerance and abhorrence of cruelty assymptoms of ressentiment, and a liberal in the publicsphere, where one would respect and act on those prin-ciples? Does not the public/private distinction of theself into ironist and liberal yield an impossible psycho-logical bi-cameralism which would be a recipe for polit-ical cynicism (Nietzsche working behind a Millianmask)?”

RR: Well, I think James was just as ironic as Nietzsche,and as committed to having his own religious experi-ences—quite independent of politics, his family, oranything else. But he didn’t think liberal sentimentswere manifestations of resentiment. Had he readNietzsche he would have said, “yeah, Nietzsche is rightabout perspectivism, but wrong about liberalism.” Thatis my view of Nietzsche. You can take over a lot ofNietzsche’s stuff about self-creation without thinkingthat people who aren’t interested in self-creation, oraren’t up to it, are base—to be neglected or enslaved.An ideal Jamesian democracy would have a place for allthe vibrant self-creating activities that anybody wouldever want to engage in, but would not insist thatanybody be self-creative if they don’t feel like it. There’sa real difference from Nietzsche there.

Q: One of the things that makes people nervous is whenyou suggest that one’s pleasure in life is relegated to theprivate sphere. The public sphere is just for making

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RR: Did Mill say that? I don’t think there’s anything inOn Liberty to lend comfort to the enemies of the welfarestate.

Q: It seems to me that enemies of the welfare state havelong used arguments about the private sphere toprohibit government intervention in the economy.Perhaps this is just a realm where we spend our timearguing about what counts as public and private andthat’s one of the many arguments that happen in thepolitical sphere.

RR: Suppose Marx had never lived, and we all had toget along with Mill. The Republicans and theThatcherites would have been saying “the danger toliberty is the government.” The left would have beensaying “the danger to liberty is the bosses, oligarchies,corporations, what not.” They both would have had apoint. But I don’t see anything in Mill that would haveswung him toward the one side or toward the other.

I’ll tell you one line you could use for a titlewhich I intend to use as a blurb for some book some-time. Richard Posner has always said that philosophi-cally I’m on the right track, it’s just that I had no senseof concrete economics or socioeconomic policy: “Rortyis still talking about ‘oligarchy’ and ‘the bosses.’” I wantto use that.�

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